Pixel Scroll 5/4/18 The Scroll Above The Pixel Was The Color Of An Old File, Tuned To A Dead DNS

Following weeks of internal bickering, sex-abuse allegations and a financial investigation by police, the body that hands out the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature announced Friday that no prize will be awarded this year.

Instead, the academy said two Nobel Prizes in Literature will be handed out next year, the 2018 prize and the 2019 prize. The decision was made Thursday at a weekly meeting of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on the grounds that the group was in too deep a crisis to choose a Nobel winner properly.

“The present crisis of confidence places high demands on a long-term and robust work for change,” said Anders Olsson, the academy’s permanent secretary. “We find it necessary to commit time to recovering public confidence in the Academy before the next laureate can be announced.”

And in spite of all of that, I struggle every day with my self esteem, my self worth, and my value not only as an actor and writer, but as a human being.

That’s because I live with Depression and Anxiety, the tag team champions of the World Wrestling With Mental Illness Federation.

And I’m not ashamed to stand here, in front of six hundred people in this room, and millions more online, and proudly say that I live with mental illness, and that’s okay. I say “with” because even though my mental illness tries its best, it doesn’t control me, it doesn’t define me, and I refuse to be stigmatized by it.

Free Comic Book Day has been an annual event for 17 years now. I’ve been writing up this guide to the FCBD books for the past 10 of those, so believe me when I say:

This year’s a good ‘un. The best yet. Don’t skip it.

There are more all-ages books in this year’s mix, more stories starring girls, women and people of color and a healthier, more robust selection of genres to choose from than ever before.

It’s also gratifying to see fewer publishers putting out FCBD offerings that amount to little more than samplers, offering readers only tiny snippets of stories from several different comics they publish. Happily, most of the books you’ll be able to pick on Saturday — even those that are simply excerpts from new or forthcoming graphic novels — make for solid, substantial, satisfying reads.

Here’s an example —

Title: Bongo Comics

Genre: TV Tie-In/Humor

The Gist: A perennially solid FCBD choice: Looks and feels like several episodes of (latter-day, it must be said) Simpsons.

Additional Info: Standout story is the lead one: Lisa takes over Krusty’s show and transforms it into an educational snore. (Yes, it’s just a riff on the season one episode “Krusty Gets Busted,” but it’s got primo Sideshow Mel content — he studied English Lit at Cornell!)

A $ 5,000 donation from the National Gypsum Company has helped the Ray Bradbury Statue Committee reach and surpass its halfway-mark goal to erect a statue commemorating the life and works of world-renowned author and Waukegan native Ray Bradbury.

The proposed 12-foot-tall statue, which will sit on the grounds of the Waukegan Public Library on County Street in downtown Waukegan, was inspired by Bradbury’s poem “If Only We Had Taller Been” and will be created in stainless steel by acclaimed artist Zachary Oxman, depicting Bradbury astride a rocket ship.

Back in 2011, a tweet to then-mayor Dave Bing led to a Kickstarter project that gained worldwide attention.

Project organizers announced yesterday that the Robocop Statue will land at the Michigan Science Center.

It’s been a long, strange trip for the 10-foot-tall bronze statue. From tweet to Facebook group to Kickstarter project to one small plan to one much larger vision. On the project update, organizers say, “From a humble thought of 3D scanning an action figure and blowing it up to 6 feet tall to pour in iron, we somehow found ourselves on a path to create a 10-foot-tall officially MGM-sanctioned bronze statue from a recreation of the original suit Peter Weller wore when he played RoboCop in 1987”.

They’re astoundingly good editors. They will tell you exactly what’s working, exactly what’s not working. I took every last edit from every one of these kids. They are the purest readers. They do want to be entertained, and I’ll say that sometimes they are easier to please, for sure, than cynical adult readers, because it’s all new to them — so this might have been, like, the seventh chapter book some of these kids read, or the second or the third. So that’s why I feel honored to be part of their reading experience at such a young age, because I remember every last book I read in that era. I was not, like, a voracious reader, so I remember the one or two books a year that I read when I was ten and 11 and 12, because I had to be dragged kicking and screaming to a chapter book at that age.

The Shadow Clarke jurors have now all produced their reading lists, and the official Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist has been revealed. It’s time to reflect on everyone’s choices.

At this point, it is worth reminding everyone once again that the Shadow Clarke jurors are not in direct competition with the Arthur C. Clarke Award judges. Our projects are complementary but rather different. The Clarke Award judges have to choose a winner at the end of their judging process, and we, the sf reading public, are not privy to their deliberations, as is right and proper. The Shadow Clarke jurors, on the other hand, don’t have to choose a winner, hence our emphasis on choosing ‘reading lists’: lists of titles that interest us and will, we hope, promote some broader discussion about the state of science fiction in 2018. And we can talk about how we made our choices. As our introductions have shown, we’ve chosen our lists according to a wide range of criteria. And yes, in some instances we are playing against the system, so to speak, but we have a licence to explore the submissions list in a different way.

(12)DEAR OLD DAD. Son of Bigfoot Trailer #1.

A teenage boy journeys to find his missing father only to discover that he’s actually Bigfoot.

The researcher behind the study, Jack Grieve at the University of Birmingham, UK, analysed more than 980 million Tweets in total – consisting of 8.9 billion words – posted between October 2013 and November 2014, and spanning 3,075 of the 3,108 US counties.

From this huge dataset, Grieve first identified any terms that were rare at the beginning of the study (occurring less than once per billion words in the last quarter of 2013) but which had then steadily risen in popularity over the course of the following year. He then filtered the subsequent list for proper nouns (such as Timehop) and those appearing in commercial adverts, and he also removed any words that were already in Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Acronyms, however, were included.

Another effect is called “aliasing,” where something is moving in beat with the camera frame rate. The most common of these is when you watch a video of a car moving, and it looks like the wheels are spinning backward. They’re not! It’s just that the wheel spins almost all the way around in the time it takes the camera to take two frames of video, so in the second frame it looks like the wheel has turned backward a little bit. Do this many times in a row and you get that weird effect of the wheels looking like they’re spinning the wrong way. I wrote about this extensively when a video taken by a camera that fell out of a plane went viral. You can also use it to make what looks like a magic spiral of water.

So you can get really weird effects by accident. However, artist John Edmark has used this effect on purpose and to his advantage, creating stunning and mesmerizing videos. He makes sculptures with cyclic patterns in them, then records them spinning (he also uses a strobe light with timed pulses to mimic camera aliasing). What you wind up with is very cool:

Diggin the stroooooobes, mannnnnn. The sound track is flashing me back. Ah. Now I remember listening to the Environments LP, “Tintinnabulation.” Any more, I find the surf and rainstorm ones are much more my, ah, speed.

Reading: I’ve started The Cloud Roads, and right now all I can say is: OMG MARTHA WELLS WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE? This book is hitting ALL my sweet spots.

I’m currently being very annoyed because the last book in the series is still not available in audio format, and the Hugo packet (which will hopefully at least contain the text version) isn’t here yet. Sigh.

(1) This has been a near-constant soap opera in Sweden for a month now, and the remaining active members of the Swedish Academy has consistently managed to show that they are ready to dig themselves just a little bit deeper. Usually right after showing some sign of actually having a clue.

The parallels in early development with Readercon and Wiscon in 2012 and 2013 are quite strong, but I have also seen some movements of defence of the Academy, usually by ignoring the actual sexual harassment and rape accusations that were the focus of the initial crisis.

@Soon Lee: Given how the Swedish Academy has behaved, and with no real sign of improvement, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Nobel Foundation went for the Nuclear Option: ask the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters to award the Nobel prize in literature instead.

(Nobel’s will is intentionally ambigious in several respects. The will only mentions “the academy in Stockholm” for the prize in literature, and there are several academies present there. Back then, both the Swedish Academy and the Academy of Letters were considered possible options, and tossed around the responsibility like a hot potato until the then permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy shamed the other members there to accept the responsibility.)

I have come up empty, so I am sharing my friend’s question with y’all.

This is stuck in my brain today. Old science fiction story, very very short. An engineer is wrestling with the problem of communication with a space mission, far enough away that lightspeed delay in radio transmission means conversations could take hours. His mother gives him the answer – don’t wait for the other side to answer, just keep sending every and any information that might be relevant or helpful. The engineer is grateful, and the mother walks away thinking it’s just like meeting up with her friends for bridge; the first rule of communication is “never stop talking”.

This time I’m rec’ing Ptah’s other awesome comic, Leif & Thorn. This secondary-world fantasy uses a lot of magic-as-technology; it has mages; knights who can draw a magic weapon out of their chest; GLBT and other types of characters, with lots of sexuality/gender/racial diversity; there’s a romance at the heart of it, but there’s a lot of other serious stuff, like PTSD, consent, et al. Great art, interesting world and worldbuilding, interesting characters, tough situations, humor!

This is a daily (!!! 6/week+bonus stuff), although periodically she posts things like short AU pieces (essentially fanfic of her own stuff, which boggles my mind, though I’ve seen another webcomic creator do this) and other off-beat extras. Take it away, Erin:

A cross-cultural LGBT+ romantic comedy.

Leif is a gardener in thrall to a mysterious debt, serving his native Sønheim at a foreign embassy. Thorn is a Knight of Ceannis who got severely burned while dragonslaying, and was rewarded with a “cushy” job guarding the embassy gates. Thorn doesn’t speak Leif’s language too well at first — but as they get to know each other, he finds a lot of reasons to learn.

@ Bonnie: Welcome to Raksura fandom! When you’ve read all the books, go look up Wells’ Patreon, where she’s still putting up Raksura snippets and the occasional short story. There’s some very good Raksura fanfic as well.